CDs Dead In 2012?

[johnfull]

I've found that CDs can be improved by re-scanning them at 24/96 (bit/kHz) and
formatting them as DVD-A with the free program, DVD AudioFile.
Bumping the resolution removes the harshness and ringing so common to the 16/44 format. Apparently, the format itself is capable of a lot more subtlety than I thought.
Additionally, 3 CDs can fit on one DVD disc in the 24/96 format.

 

[TLS Guy]

I've found that CDs can be improved by re-scanning them at 24/96 (bit/kHz) and
formatting them as DVD-A with the free program, DVD AudioFile.
Bumping the resolution removes the harshness and ringing so common to the 16/44 format. Apparently, the format itself is capable of a lot more subtlety than I thought.
Additionally, 3 CDs can fit on one DVD disc in the 24/96 format.

Balderdash! You can't create bits out of nothing. You are just wasting space.

That is the digital equivalent of perpetual motion.

In effect what you are saying is that you can chuck as many bits as you want on the floor and then recreate them out of thin air. This can NOT happen.

So please don't promulgate erroneous nonsense, especially on these forums.

 

[johnfull]

Wow, that was harsh.
You are right that bits can't be recovered (except with psychoacoustics, etc), but I'm
talking more about the playback properties. CD players differ in their ability to sample
and hold and interpolate and suppress erroneous signals. We were oversold on the
format originally and digital advances have long since made it obsolete. Another year
of development would have allowed 48 rather than 44 kbs, which would have eliminated the need for steep filtering at 20k. Anyway, I'm not sure what you're defending. I'm simply saying that I don't like CD sound, as a rule, but it can be smoothed somewhat by transfer to DVD-A format.

 

[TLS Guy]

Wow, that was harsh.
You are right that bits can't be recovered (except with psychoacoustics, etc), but I'm
talking more about the playback properties. CD players differ in their ability to sample
and hold and interpolate and suppress erroneous signals. We were oversold on the
format originally and digital advances have long since made it obsolete. Another year
of development would have allowed 48 rather than 44 kbs, which would have eliminated the need for steep filtering at 20k. Anyway, I'm not sure what you're defending. I'm simply saying that I don't like CD sound, as a rule, but it can be smoothed somewhat by transfer to DVD-A format.

That is bogus. CD is fine to 20 kHz the limit of hearing. Brick wall anti aliasing filters went out years ago, in the CD medium. They did cause some ringing in early CD players. That has not been an issue for years with well designed CD players.

 

[Adam]

Welcome to the forum, John!

In effect what you are saying is that you can chuck as many bits as you want on the floor and then recreate them out of thin air. This can NOT happen.

That doesn't mean that you can't make them sound "better." Systems these days have things like Onkyo's "Music Optimizer" to enhance the sound from compressed music files. I don't know if the proposed software does something similar, but the concept has been implemented into commercial products.

That is the digital equivalent of perpetual motion.

I look it as the audio equivalent to video upscaling. Sure, my TV or disc player can't recreate the video data that doesn't exist in a 480p signal, but the upscaling algorithm sure as heck makes that non-existent data look pretty good on my 1080p TV.

 

[johnfull]

Hmmm...is 'bogus' less harsh than 'balderdash'?
This thread is about the death of the CD format.
Lots of folks talk about the death of DVD-A and SACD, which is bogus balderdash.
The silkiness of a well-mastered SACD cannot be reproduced in a dithered RedBook.
Those who can't hear the difference do not disprove the difference.
I first noticed better sound coming from HiFi videocassettes and then from DVDs.
Early CDs were sold as the perfection of sound. The highs often sounded like shattering
glass. Old well-loved works were remastered to take advantage of the ability to create bright and hard sound. Not everyone is enamored of wood blocks and washboards.
If CD dies as a format, it will be partially because it is an obsolete technology.
The mp3 market is one side of the story, but hi-fi is the other...

 

[TLS Guy]

Welcome to the forum, John!


That doesn't mean that you can't make them sound "better." Systems these days have things like Onkyo's "Music Optimizer" to enhance the sound from compressed music files. I don't know if the proposed software does something similar, but the concept has been implemented into commercial products.


I look it as the audio equivalent to video upscaling. Sure, my TV or disc player can't recreate the video data that doesn't exist in a 480p signal, but the upscaling algorithm sure as heck makes that non-existent data look pretty good on my 1080p TV.

These are not equivalent at all. CD is not a compressed medium. It is fine thought the audio spectrum in terms of frequency response, and distortion.

It is a little marginal in signal to noise and therefore dynamic range for very large classical works. However a dynamic range expander would create artifact and make the noise floor more evident.

For the vast majority of program CD is fine. Huge block buster operas require Blue Ray.

 

[Adam]

These are not equivalent at all. CD is not a compressed medium.

Fair enough. However, I believe that the concept is similar, as CDs have missing information. The continuous analog signal has been digitized into discrete points. Perhaps filling in the gaps might be done in a better way with that software compared to the system that John is using for CDs. Maybe a better CD player would do the same thing, I don't know.

 

[johnfull]

Thanks, Adam!
I don't think that rescanning 16/44 CDs to 24/96 does any upscaling at all.
Converting to mp3 at maximum bitrate would probably upscale.
Maybe it changes the way the DACs create the analog sound.
What I do notice is a reduction in the crispy hard-edged sound characteristic of CDs.
It would be great if studios would release everything in 24/192 directly from masters.
We all know they won't do this, though, because of the real fear of piracy.
The closest they come these days is hi-fidelity 45 RPM vinyl, since they know the disc
will degrade with use. Digital is forever and this is the bane of those who own the originals...

 

[Adam]

Hopefully I can get schooled a little bit this morning.

How does HDCD play into all of this? Thanks.

 

[johnfull]

I think it adds bit depth, but is still rendered at 44kHz.
All other formats, including DAT use 48kHz as the bare minimum.
CDs came to market slightly too quickly and the die was cast...

 

[BMXTRIX]

CD certainly is a 'compressed' format. Anything less than the original is introducing some sort of distortion with analog often being considered the least distorting, it is also one of the most difficult and costly ones to implement.

If CD were lossless, then DVD-A/BDA would not offer any improvement. But, because CD doesn't operate at the higher sampling rates there is some level of information that is being lost when put onto the disc. Now, it does maintain that information at a 1:1 level at the given rate, but it doesn't mean that high resolution audio doesn't offer better sound to those who have the equipment to hear the difference.

Now, a well written and carefully applied algorythm I can certainly see doing a good job of 'upconversion'. Much as we see in the video world good with bad video processing, it sounds like what johnfull is talking about is the equivalent of using a good outboard video scaler.

If you use a good outboard video scaler on all of your video material then you take the scaler of the TV and other products out of the equation. If that scaler is near top shelf in quality, then you can maximize your video quality even if a poor video processor exists in other gear simply by bypassing it.

In this case, you take the capability of a cheap CD player out of the equation. The audio format is already getting a high quality makeover. Not as good as a high resolution audio original, but better than the CD original. More importantly, it will consistently play better regardless of the equipment used and the potential poor quality of the digital hardware within them which may (or may not) oversample/upsample the CD itself.

Clearly, not touching the CD original is going to give as good of results as the CD has on it originally. But, if additional sampling is done, and is not applied well, it could bring the CD quality down. Worse, many CD players don't have any adjustments on them at all to correct for this.

Now, it all touches really deep into the black arts of audiophiledelity which I strictly try to avoid. But, for those who want the absolute best from their existing CD collection, I can see how an external audio processor, much like a really good external DAC, can deliver performance improvements and greater audio consistency between different players.

Will it be as good as a HD original? Of course not.

 

[MDS]

I don't think that rescanning 16/44 CDs to 24/96 does any upscaling at all.
Converting to mp3 at maximum bitrate would probably upscale.
Maybe it changes the way the DACs create the analog sound.

You're confusing multiple different terms.

In order to convert 16/44 to 24/96 you have to resample, not 'rescan' or 'upscale'. As TLS Guy was trying to explain, you don't magically get new information that was somehow 'missing' from the original.

The only thing resampling can do for you is push quantization noise into higher frequencies and that sometimes can be heard as a slight improvement in the highest frequencies near 20 kHz because the Nyquest frequency is now 48 kHz and not 22.05 kHz.

MP3 and other lossy compression algorithms effectively 'resample' as well - but they discard a lot of information that its model says you wouldn't hear anyway, thus reducing the file size. So taking a 16/44 PCM track (CD) and converting it to 320 kbps MP3 is even worse than resampling to 24/96 PCM. At least with resampling the PCM you haven't lost anything. You don't gain anything either (other than a larger file).

 

[MDS]

How does HDCD play into all of this? Thanks.

HDCD is an encoding format that takes a 20 bit master and encodes it in 16 bit redbook format. A player that can recoginzie the format as HDCD knows how to decode the bits to produce 20 bit samples. A player that doesn't recognize it as HDCD encoded is blissfully unaware of that fact and produces 16 bit samples.

I have a bunch of Van Halen CDs that are HDCD and they sound pretty much the same as the ones that are not HDCD.

 

[johnfull]

You neglect the psycho-acoustics that go into mp3 production -- what BMXTRIX called
the 'black arts' for good reason -- which can sweeten the sound of a harsh CD.
I've also performed this on my some of my collection, using the maximum bitrate.
Pushing the sampling rate up on a PCM disc, though, takes a lot of stress off of the on-the-fly interpretation of the data stream, where sample and hold time is cut and aliasing is reduced. All of us of a certain age can fondly remember our vinyl and open-reel (or even 8-Track) collections that were supposed to be preserved for the ages in CD format. Most CDs of well-mastered recordings are of diminished quality in comparison to the old formats. The increase in punchiness is simply a 'loudness war' phenomenon and not related to fidelity. With all these CDs on hand and an anemic
hi-resolution market for their replacement, I'm simply looking at ways to modernize them somewhat. Three CDs on a DVD disc is one big improvement in addition to the cleaner sound. It's not a panacea, but I doubt studios will make much more effort to
release original masters in a hi-bit format because of fear of piracy...

 

[Adam]

Thanks for the explanation, MDS.

I have a bunch of Van Halen CDs that are HDCD and they sound pretty much the same as the ones that are not HDCD.

I have a Yes CD that is HDCD that didn't impress me. I suppose that I don't know if the HDCD portion was being used, though. My Oppo says that it's compatible with HDCD...but all CD players are compatible with it. That doesn't mean that it's using it.

 

[johnfull]

In a related matter, I've been reading a quadraphonic afficionado's posts about encoding
of CDs. Apparently, all the old masters from the 1970s that had quad available were left
in the encoded format when converted to CD. This guy claims to decode the CDs back
into quadraphonic format and converts them to 24/96 DTS files. Some DVD-A discs are available with a DTS track included, which makes them more accessible to a wider public...David Crosby's album:
"If I Could Only Remember My Name" being a terrific example. I prefer the DTS track to the DVD-A
because my system won't equalize multiple inputs but handles 24/96 DTS just fine...

 

[Adam]

All of us of a certain age can fondly remember our ...8-Track...

Ah, yes. Listening to Foreigner 4's "Break it Up" as it faded out then back in after the "clunk" of switching from section 1 to section 2. Memories.

I suppose a silverlining to being older and no longer able to hear high frequencies is that issues related to them on CDs don't affect me anymore.

 

[johnfull]

That was certainly not the part I remembered fondly!
I never had the Q8 format -- the quadraphonic on 8-Track.
There are folks out there busily copying them to DTS files all the time.
Apparently, there is a bootleg version of Dark Side of the Moon from such a source.
This is all hear-say, of course...meantime, I have the SACD, remastered...

 

[sholling]

These are not equivalent at all. CD is not a compressed medium. It is fine thought the audio spectrum in terms of frequency response, and distortion.

Actually they are compressed (lossy) from the original analog or 24bit master. As said before the CD's 16bit 44.1khz standard was a compromise in sound quality necessary to fit on a cheap to produce disc using the best affordable technology of the day. A housewife friendly upgrade from cassette tapes. The advantage of 24bit HD FLACs is that you are getting an exact bit for bit copy of the master. I'm not sure why gapless playback wouldn't suffice for smooth transitions between tracks but if consumers demand that operas be sold as a single track then the industry will respond.

What scares me about the thought of CDs going away is that rather than moving to FLAC or at least ALAC companies like Amazon will continue to limit sales of downloadable music to 256bit MP3.